When blues-rocker George Thorogood plays at Sands Bethlehem Event Center tonight, Aug. 2, don’t be surprised to hear the crowd uninhibitedly singing along with his best-known, good-time songs such as “Move It On Over,” “Who Do You Love” or “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.”

The surprise is that none of those songs ever was a hit – or even released as a single.

But here's Thorogood's song-by-song thoughts on his biggest tunes:

George Thorogood

In a recent telephone interview, Thorogood said radio hits were never the intention. He said that when he came to popularity in the late 1970s, “we were album-oriented rock … That’s what everybody made in the ‘70s. So we were after that market.”

He said he was fortunate enough to have his one radio hit, “Bad to the Bone,” during the MTV video era, and then caught the advent of rock classic radio with “Who Do You Love,” “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” and “Move It On Over.”

“So in that world, we have radio hits,” he says, jokingly explaining that he’s calling from a location he can’t divulge. “I swore an oath with the government not to give the whereabouts of my location. John, you know better than that. You know how it is. In your case, I’ll make an exception. I’m in a state that borders the Pacific Ocean.”

“In the mainstream world of whatever you want to call it, that never really happened for us,” he says. “But that’s not the kind of artists we are anyway. They called it alternative rock. In our day, it was called ‘underground rock.’ Album-oriented, non-commercial stuff, but it was still groovy stuff. That’s what FM was created for – not for AM, the hits. It was created for other purposes, and in that world, we have flourished.”

Thorogood at Musikfest in 2009

Thorogood said his latest album, 2011’s “2120 South Michigan Ave.” – a collection of songs by classic artists of Chess Records – was the idea of Capitol Records. He says that after he and his group The Destroyers cut the tune “Tail Dragger,” “it got some attention on the radio.”

Capitol Records, he said, “came back and wanted a follow-up to that, since we were making a little noise with that tune. They wanted a whole album of that kind of material. And we said, ‘Well, I don’t know whether we’ll be able to pull that off.’ And they came back and said, ‘Well, how about an album dedicated to Chess [Records] and use as much of that kind of material, and that would kind of be the hook. So it was more of Capitol’s idea than ours.”

Not even the title was his idea, Thorogood said. “I wanted to call it, ‘Let It Rock,’” he says.

But Thorogood says he bought into the idea. “I want to keep our profile going as long as possible,” he says. “And after all, you’re still talking about it now.”

The album hit No. 2 on the blues chart, becoming the group’s latest blues-chart hit. So while Thorogood hasn’t had pop radio hits, he’s continued to be a hit on blues charts: His last four studio albums have hot No. 1 or No. 2 on that chart.

“They’re top-sellers somewhere,” Thorogood says with a laugh. “I get the checks every six months. I don’t really look to what supermarket’s selling them.”

And with that he ends the interview. “Most of the time I haven’t been telling you the truth anyway – so what’s the difference?” he says.

But not before he gave his views on five of his best-known songs. “Rock and roll never sleeps. It just passes out,” he says.

“Bad to the Bone” – “I guy once asked me, ‘How does it feel to be a one-hit wonder? ’ And I said, ‘Better than being a no-hit wonder.’ I mean, look at all the artists in the world – all of them, not just The Beatles, but everybody. If you come down to it, every artists is probably known for one, maybe two songs. If you walked down the streets of Afghanistan and said, ‘Name me 12 Rolling Stones songs,’ you think the people could do it? Probably not – they’d probably say two or three. So if you look at the big picture, ‘Bad to the Bone’ is our signature hit.”

“Move It On Over” – “We were very lucky that we grabbed that before Linda Ronstadt did. When we did it, she was going great guns with that country-rock thing that she was doing. And I said, ‘If we don’t do this, she will, and she’ll put it in a higher key and have a pedal steel on it, and we’ll be hung out to dry.’ So that’s why we jumped on it. It was very much in vogue then.”

“Who Do You Love” – “That was another album song. When we did the album ‘Move It On Over,’ we needed three more songs and that was one of them that Rounder [Records] demanded us to do. I said, ‘Everybody’s done this song!’ … and better than I’ll ever do it. And they said, ‘Do it anyway.’ I never knew that there was a whole new market that never heard of it.”

“One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” – “Well, the second I heard that, I knew that song was a hit for somebody. I saw John Lee Hooker doing it. I knew something strange was happening. When he did it, people were dancing when people never danced to the blues. And all the people who were dancing were women. So I said, ‘Aha. A-ha-ha. There it is. That’s the key right there.”

5. “Get a Haircut” – “That was the song somebody wrote about me, and I didn’t even know it. To this day, people swear I wrote it and I didn’t. If ever there was a song written about what it is we’re about, or anything that’s our tune. And it was something we didn’t write. And after I heard it, I said, ‘Well, we’re going to do that.’ Because if we don’t Neil Young’s going to write a song like this for some grunge band in Seattle. Somebody. The Ramones are going to do this song eventually. Or the Stooges or Iggy Pop or somebody like that. It’s that obvious. So I figured, it might as well be us.”

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JOHN J. MOSER has been around long enough to have seen the original Ramones in a small club in New Jersey, U2 from the fourth row of a theater and Bob Dylan's born-again tours. But he also has the number for All-American Rejects' Nick Wheeler on his cell phone, wrote the first story ever done on Jack's Mannequin and hung out in Wiz Khalifa's hotel room.

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS

JODI DUCKETT: As The Morning Call's assistant features editor responsible for entertainment, she spends a lot of time surveying the music landscape and sizing up the Valley's festivals and club scene. She's no expert, but enjoys it all — especially artists who resonated in her younger years, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Tracy Chapman, Santana and Joni Mitchell.

KATHY LAUER-WILLIAMS enjoys all types of music, from roots rock and folk to classical and opera. Music has been a constant backdrop to her life since she first sat on the steps listening to her mother’s Broadway LPs when she was 2. Since becoming a mother herself, she has become well-versed on the growing genre of kindie rock and, with her son in tow, can boast she has seen a majority of the current kid’s performers from Dan Zanes to They Might Be Giants.

STEPHANIE SIGAFOOS: A Jersey native raised in Northeast PA, she was reared in a house littered with 8-tracks, 45s and cassette tapes of The Beatles, Elvis, Meatloaf and Billy Joel. She also grew up on the sounds of Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks and Tim McGraw and can be found traversing the countryside in search of the sounds of a steel guitar. A fan of today's 'new country,' she digs mainstream/country-pop crossovers like Lady Antebellum and Sugarland and other artists that illustrate the genre's diversity.